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Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is assuring voters that upcoming elections will not falter despite the coronavirus pandemic, making sure that no citizen has to choose between their health and the right to vote.

Last week, Benson joined a virtual townhall hosted by Emgage, a Muslim American civic engagement organization, where she talked about absentee voting and election workers.

With the current health crisis, Benson is encouraging voters to cast ballots by mail. All eligible and registered voters in Michigan may now request an absent voter ballot without providing a reason after a constitutional change during the 2018 election. Nearly a million voters took advantage of their new right in the presidential primary election last month.

The right to vote by mail for every citizen in our state isnot changing. Its going to be available in every election this year, and every election will be held this year. For citizens that are able and want to exercise that right, you can request your ballot be mailed to you directly. You can find that request from on our website or with your local clerk. Simply fill it out, sign it and return it and when the time comes you will receive your ballot in August and November, Benson said. I encourage you to do that, and to encourage members of your community to do that as well. Oftentimes people dont know they have that right, and if they do they dont know how to access it.

Many jurisdictions have decided to postpone their May election to August, but communities that need to hold their election in May will do so primarily by mail. All registered voters were mailed applications to apply for an absentee ballot, along with postage paid return envelopes if they had a May election scheduled.

Clerk offices will remain open through election day for voters with disabilities and people who forget to mail their ballot in time and need to drop it off, and must be available for any same-day voter registrations.

Senator Ruth Johnson, former secretary of state and chair of the state Senate Elections Committee, called the vote-by-mail plan an absolute disaster. She had been urging Governor Whitmer to push the elections to August.

Senator Ruth Johnson

Ive been begging them to reschedule and consolidate with August, I warned them of all the potential problems and now what were seeing is even worse than feared, she said. We saw these issues in Wisconsin. People reported never getting an absentee ballot they request or a ballot they completed not getting back to the clerk in time to be counted.

Due to Michigans robust vote by mail option, Benson says we are better positioned to avoid a situation much like what happened in Wisconsin during their recent in-person presidential primary.

Milwaukee election officials announced the city would open only five polling locations for the primary. The city typically has 180 voting cities, but axed other locations due to mass poll worker shortages.

In Michigan, were much better positioned to avoid a situation like what happened in Wisconsin from the get-go. We have a robust vote by mail program that is established, it is sacrosanct, it is in our constitution and weve been working to implement it effectively since I took office over a year ago, Benson said. The vote by mail system was created by voters. Because of that, so many voters already want to do it and believe in the system.

For now, communities with scheduled elections are moving ahead with preparations to ensure voters and poll workers safety. Election workers will be provided with PPE equipment, and Bensons office is developing physical distancing guidelines.

Were working to ensure that all voters can have confidence when they access their vote, however they choose to access it in an election this year, that their vote will be counted safely and securely, and were putting protections in place for all who are working elections as well so they can do their essential job safely and securely, Benson said.

Bensons office is aggressively recruiting new election workers, as many of the seniors who usually serve and staff elections may not want to risk in-person interactions on the next election day. The recently launched Democracy MVP program encourages citizens to sign up to be an election worker to assist clerks and count ballots. Workers will not serve at traditional polling places, and will adhere to strict public health guidelines. Learn more and fill out the interest form at Michigan.gov/DemocracyMVP.

Over 1,600 people applied in 10 days to be a part of the program, which is four times whats needed for the May 5 election, according to Benson. However, she encourages citizens to continue to sign up.

We are at a very unique and critical moment in the history of our country. But as much as theres a health crisis, as much as theres an economic crisis, theres also a potential crisis for our democracy if we dont preserve the access and integrity of our elections, Benson said. That requires all of us as citizens to stand up and ensure that our democracy stays on schedule, thats why were moving forward with our elections.

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Secretary of State: 'Democracy will not falter in age of COVID-19' - Spinal Column Online

Has the fourth estate overstepped the mark, piling undue pressure on a beleaguered British government doing its utmost to navigate through a national catastrophe that was not of its own making? Thats certainly the conclusion of our political masters, who three weeks ago briefed that their polling showed public dissatisfaction with gotcha questions from journalists.

It is the verdict, too, of Robbie Gibb, the former BBC head of political programming who became director of communications under Theresa May. Journalists at press conferences were asking questions through the prism of political culpability and were hunting for government U-turns, he claimed, suggesting they focus on medical queries about the virus instead. Even Lord Sugar chimed in, arguing that the public do not want or need to blame, let alone require constant criticism of our government, who are doing their very best in a very difficult and unprecedented global emergency.

Why are government outriders so keen to delegitimise scrutiny, to portray any questioning as sabotage; to cast dissent as embittered opponents opportunistically lashing out, contemptuous of Boris Johnsons mystical connection with the British electorate? As it happens, polling finds that the newspaper most consistently critical of the governments strategy this one has been judged to be doing the best job of covering the pandemic by the public; the most pro-government newspaper, the Sun, the worst job. Independent polling has not shown any public backlash against a supposedly excessively critical media: it is a myth.

Far from being a victim of partisan skulduggery, the government is facing little scrutiny for the largest civilian death toll outside of conflict. In the middle of March, the governments chief scientific adviser, Chris Whitty, declared that keeping coronavirus deaths below 20,000 would be a good outcome. As of today the official number of coronavirus deaths in hospitals and in the community stands at more than 26,000, making the UK the third-worst-hit country in the world, behind Italy and the US. We are still at least a year away from developing a vaccine.

So when Johnson simultaneously insults and deceives the nation, saying, many will be looking at our apparent success, where is the deafening outrage at a prime minister who has made Britain an international case study in what not to do in a pandemic? A fortnight after assuming the premiership, Johnson declared that our first duty is to protect the public in the most basic way. He has betrayed that most basic and sacred responsibility of government.

The governments attempt to airbrush from history their embrace of herd immunity a policy even Donald Trump denounced as catastrophic has been aided and abetted by a largely supine media. Instead of being opposed, the strategy was facilitated by some parts of the media. While Lombardy in northern Italy appeared consumed by a biblical disaster, ITVs Robert Peston was writing an article headlined Herd immunity will be vital to stopping coronavirus.

When the British government abandoned contact tracing after 10 deaths and 590 confirmed cases, it made a choice. If we hadnt stopped it on 12 March, our epidemic would have been much less, as Anthony Costello, a professor of global health, puts it. They effectively allowed it to spread. As the virus passed from person to person, the country had insufficient surgical gowns, visors, swabs or body bags, because the government had failed to buy personal protective equipment in its pandemic stockpile. Now ministers clap and cheer the key workers they left exposed to a deadly illness. If the media cannot land a blow on the government for decisions that lead to thousands of avoidable deaths, then what is it for?

The systematic attempt to stifle even mild attempts by the media to hold government to account is itself dangerous. A fortnight ago, a senior cabinet source told the Telegraph: We didnt want to go down this route in the first place public and media pressure pushed the lockdown, we went with the science. If there had been more determination by the media to challenge the governments decision to make Britain an international outlier in the pandemic, lockdown may have happened earlier and thousands of lives could have been spared. Decisions made by our government have left us one of the most devastated nations on Earth. The cost? Personal suffering as thousands of families mourn the loss of loved ones and unnecessarily grave economic and social turmoil. If our democracy cannot hold our government to account for turning an inevitable tragedy into an avoidable national catastrophe, then it has failed altogether.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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If we can't criticise the government for avoidable deaths, what's the point of democracy? - The Guardian

Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force, refused to wear a mask Tuesday as he met with doctors and patients at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. After the tour, Pence was asked by reporters why he violated a Mayo Clinic policy requiring everyone in the hospital to wear a face covering or mask.

Vice President Mike Pence: Let me say, as vice president of the United States, Im tested for the coronavirus on a regular basis, and everyone who is around me is tested for the coronavirus. And since I dont have the coronavirus, I thought itd be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible healthcare personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you.

On Tuesday, the Mayo Clinic tweeted that it had informed Vice President Pence of the masking policy prior to his arrival. Later in the day, the tweet was deleted without explanation.

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Pence Refuses to Wear Face Mask During Tour of Mayo Clinic - Democracy Now!

THE UNITED STATES MAY SOON reach levels of unemployment not seen since the 1930s. During that period, the government saw an obligation to provide artists in need with economic support by commissioning or hiring them to produce public artworks on a massive scale. These provisions lasted a decade before they were closed down, when the nation transitioned to a war economy, and they were not resurrected when the war endedalthough there were calls for them to be. But while the New Deal arts programs turned out to be temporary, in the minds of many who worked on them and managed them, they signaled a fundamental shift in arts economy and social basea shift from the culture of an elitist plutocratic art market to a truly democratic culture. As an unemployed artists group put the matter in September 1933: The State, by patronizing public art at this time can eliminate once and for all the unfortunate dependence of American artists upon the caprice of private patronage.1Such was the hope. As I shall show, its realization was not so easy. Even so, the idea of an alternative economy of the arts continues to appeal, and with good reason.

To many critics at the time, the Roosevelt administrations of the 1930s and 1940s represented a left turn in US politics. Yet the New Deal was not, in any of its phases, a radically redistributive program, nor one that sought to challenge fundamentally the institutions of American capitalism. It named a sequence of pragmatic initiatives to deal with the economic crisis through an extension of the powers of the federal state and the executive. Its achievements were, at most, a pallid reflection of European social-welfare provisions, and they came about partly as a result of popular pressures from below and, especially, the rise of industrial unionism embodied in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from the mid-1930s onward.

In a speech delivered in 1932, Roosevelt pledged himself to bold, persistent experimentation to end the depression; in actuality, the administration had no coherent ideology. However, the scale and duration of the depression gave new appeal to the idea of state intervention in the economy, particularly in light of what appeared to be the successes of Soviet industrial planning. In Roosevelts first term, the more radical among his appointeessuch as Henry Wallace and Rexford Tugwellconceived of the New Deal as a long-term project to rein in overweening corporate power and bring it under democratic control, to give organized labor more of a voice in the counsels of government, and to create a full employment economy of shared abundance. But the apparently radical interventionism of Roosevelts first-term legislation, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, would not survive his second. Liberals who conceived the state as taking on a permanent directive role to ensure against the vagaries of the market were increasingly sidelined by those who saw it as playing an essentially compensatory one, redressing problems in the economy as they arose but not seeking to channel the mechanisms of capitalism as such.2

Although the idea of federal support for the arts in this time of crisis had backing from influential figures, including the president and the first lady, the administration was never committed to establishing federal patronage on a permanent basis. Support for the arts occurred within the framework of a major public works program, conceived to reduce unemployment and pump-prime the economy and various work relief schemes. The Treasury Section of Fine Arts (193443) exemplifies the public works model of state interventionism; the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (193543), while also a form of market interventionism, exemplifies the work relief model. The idea of work relief advanced by the progressive social workers in the administrationnotably, Frances Perkins (Secretary of Labor) and Harry Hopkins (Secretary of Commerce)was premised on the belief that giving the unemployed work appropriate to their experience would conserve skills and maintain morale. Direct relief (dole), though cheaper to administer, was demoralizing.

Hopkins believed that the state should play an enduring role in supporting the arts, but this hardly numbered among his major concerns. Attempts by liberal congressmen to institute a federal Bureau of Fine Artsthe Coffee-Pepper and Sirovich Bills of 1938foundered ignominiously in the House. However, while the idea of a permanent arts program found little support in Congress, it was promoted by some administrators of the Treasury Section and Federal Art Project and supported by many who worked on them and the organizations they built, such as the Workers Alliance of America and the Artists Union, which had been set up in New York on a communist initiative as the Unemployed Artists Group in summer 1933. The status of Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists as wage-laborers gave clarity and purpose to the Artists Union and strengthened its sense of solidarity with other unionized and unionizing workers. By the fall of 1934, it had more than seven hundred members, a number which more than doubled after the start of the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935.3 The Artists Union engaged in an ongoing struggle with the WPA-FAP administration around pay and working conditions, layoffs, and freedom of expression, so that the defense of existing provisions increasingly took precedence over the demand for permanence. In the late 1930s, the main voice calling for an enduring system of federal patronage was the Communist Party, which held up as a model a fantasy of the Soviet artistic economy. The idea met its final defeat as the communist-engineered Cultural Plank of the ill-fated 1948 Progressive Party campaign to elect Henry Wallace to the presidency.4

The New Deal was not, in any of its phases, a radically redistributive program, nor one that sought to challenge fundamentally the institutions of American capitalism.

In November 1933, Hopkins secured four hundred million dollars to set up the Civil Works Administration (CWA), a short-term work relief program to be administered on a federal basis. By January 18, 1934, it had a workforce of 4.2 million. At first, CWA projects were overwhelmingly in construction and gave work mainly to the unskilled. In December 1933, however, the CWA made a grant to the Treasury Department to employ artists for the embellishment of public buildings, which was the basis for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). Federally administered and directed by the artist and businessman Edward Bruce, the PWAP lasted four and a half months and cost $1,312,117. It employed 3,749 artists who produced 15,663 art and craft objects, including 706 murals and mural sketches, 3,821 oils, 2,938 watercolors, 1,518 prints, and 647 sculptures. The works were widely distributed among government buildings, offices, and schools.5 The summation of the program was the National Exhibition of Art by the Public Works of Art Project, held at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, DC, in April and May of 1934. According to the catalog, the subject assigned to the artists was the American scene in all its phases. Within this scope the artists were given the utmost freedom of expression. The works on view were overwhelmingly bland images of landscapes, urban scenes, and labor, some idea of which can be formed from the Smithsonian American Art Museums 2009 exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists.

Art critic Forbes Watson was the PWAPs technical director and principal ideologue. The discourse through which Watson and Bruce framed both the PWAP and the later Treasury Section was entirely in line with the radical interventionism of New Dealers such as Tugwell and Wallace: that is, it envisaged a fundamental shift in the functions of government in the art market. The project was presented as the first truly democratic system of patronage in history and as a proper cultural counterpart to the American republic. Although the PWAP was supposed to be above politics, Bruce claimed that its spirit fits into the New Deal and gives it that idealistic value which is indispensable for the creation of a new philosophy for a new civilization.6

The most controversial aspect of the project was the attempt to foster a modern public art in emulation of Mexican muralism, a facet of the PWAPs work represented at the Corcoran mainly by photographs. The most divisive PWAP muralsand arguably the projects greatest accomplishmentare found in the base of Coit Tower in San Francisco. A monument to the benefactress Lillie Hitchcock Coit completed in 1933, the tower is a reinforced concrete column 180 feet high, resting on a base of 32 feet. The plan to decorate the cramped and, in parts, ill-lit first and second floors with scenes of Californian life involved 3,691 square feet of mostly true fresco, executed by twenty-five artists and nineteen assistants. In the whole span of New Deal art patronage, it was unparalleled in its ambitious model of collective labor. But the furor over contributions by communist and communist-leaning artistswhich led only to the removal of a hammer-and-sickle emblemindicated how difficult it would be for artists to inject the revolutionary iconography of Mexican muralism, so central to the movements ethos and status, into federal public art.7 One of the contentious muralsand arguably the most successfulwas City Life by the communist Victor Arnautoff, whose 1936 panels on The Life of Washington, painted for George Washington High School, in San Francisco, under the auspices of the WPA-FAP, have recently demonstrated the continuing capacity of some New Deal art to bring out the contest of values entailed in almost any representation of the nations past.8

In September 1934, Bruce negotiated the establishment of the Section of Fine Arts in the Treasury, which would draw funds from the federal building program. Initially, he hoped to reserve one percent of each new buildings cost for artwork, but in the event, the Section usually received less and the majority of new constructions went undecorated. Although Bruce had planned to make the Section a permanent part of the Treasury, when he died, in 1943, the Section died with him. Whereas with the PWAP and later WPA-FAP artists were employed as wage-laborers, Section artists were commissioned to execute works for a specified sum. The Section aspired to pay twenty dollars per square foot, but rarely could, and contracts were expected to cover materials and other expenses such as travel and installation.

Historians of the Section have emphasized the tight rein exercised on the artists by the programs Washington office and the conservatism of its iconography.9 Richard D. McKinzie sums up this attitude: The Section staff knew the kind of art it wanted, made it clear to artists, and handled the commissions in a manner that gave some control if the work went wrong.10 This is true, but it should not lead readers to think that the Sections administrators were omnipotent and got everything their way. They needed artists of stature and employed a significant number of left-wingers who got at least some of what they wanted too. It is notable that the largest and most expensive Section muralsthe artists total fee was $29,000were the 2,913 square feet of true fresco in the main post office in Saint Louis, illustrating the citys history and executed by the fellow-travelers Edward Millman and Mitchell Siporin in 194042. The artists visited Mexico in 1939 to study Jos Clemente Orozcos work in preparation for their own and seem to have ignored instructions from the Washington office to tone down the over-serious expression of their figures, so as to make the social conscious qualityless insistent, as their supervisor put it.11 The murals make Saint Louis history look a violent, conflicted, and serious business.

Nonetheless, artists had to work within the Sections parameters. In the course of its existence, the Section held 190 competitions, for which it received a total of more than forty thousand sketches. Regional committees selected the winning designs and shipped them to the Sections Washington office, which had final approval and administered execution. For the majority of the 1,371 commissions it awarded no competition was held. But most went to artists who had made what were seen as notable submissions to contests. Entering was the way artists made themselves known to the Section and learned how to tailor their work to its predilections. The Section also sent its mimeographed Bulletin, for free, to eighty-five hundred artists, who could read therein exactly the kind of thing it wanted. It made clear that murals and sculptures should be easily understandable and complicated intellectual ideas would be a great drawback. Brucea conservative modern himselfdespised academicism and wanted good drawing and no social criticism. The fact that the Section excluded artists from its decision-making (except those it nominated to juries) was an ongoing cause for complaint, and the competition system was fiercely criticized in the pages of the Artists Union magazine Art Front.12 The competition system produced an illusion of fairness, rather than the substance, and induced needy artists who did not win to expend time and material costs for which they received no recompense.

All in all, the Section decorated 1,118 buildings in 1,083 locations.13 The majority of these were post offices, although it was also assigned spaces in a group of major federal buildings in Washington, DC. Post offices were embellished with paintings and sculptures that illustrated either the history or industries of the place, or the history of the mails. Yet even within the template of the pallid official art that Bruce sought to impose, with its bland didacticism and formal conservatism, some artists achieved works of complexity and distinction, among which I count Ben Shahns frescoes (1940-42) in theformerSocial Security Administration building in Washington, DC, and Philip Evergoods oil painting Cotton from Field to Mill, 1940, in the post office in Jackson, Georgia.

At the end of 1934, around twenty million people were still receiving government assistance. Roosevelt, influenced by the increasingly powerful Hopkins, was determined to reduce the dole by a massive program of emergency public works. In April 1935, Congress passed the first Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, which gave the president control of nearly five billion dollars. Rather than rely on existing agencies to administer this money, a massive new organization, the WPA, was set up under Hopkinss direction. Hopkins had always intended to include relief for artists in this program. In the end, four cultural projects were instituted, for music, theater, art, and writing, known collectively as Federal Project Number One, or Federal One.

Much larger than the programs run by Bruce from the Treasury, the WPA-FAP received nearly fourteen times the Sections funds and employed around ten times the number of individuals. Between 1935 and 1943, it realized 2,566 murals, 17,744 sculptures, 108,099 paintings in oil and other media, and some 240,000 impressions of 11,285 prints.14 Since the WPA was not established through any substantive law, and was contingent on funds granted to it by congress, it was also haunted by impermanence. Its continuance was always uncertain and became more so after Democratic defeats in the 1938 midterm elections and the convening of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in that year.

The director of the Federal Art Projectthe art critic and curator Holger Cahillwas far more sympathetic to modernism than Bruce and saw the project as a realization of the aesthetic philosophy of John Dewey, whose Art as Experience was published in 1934. Following Dewey, Cahill emphasized the pervasiveness and ordinariness of aesthetic experience and its place in community life. He criticized both the tendency for the arts to become more and more a minor luxury product, and also the concentration of American art in two or three metropolitan centers. Correspondingly, Cahill rejected extreme subjectivism and overemphasis on individual talent. For him, art was not a matter of rare occasional masterpieces, a concept which he saw in part as an effect of the machinations of the art trade. By contrast, he wanted to expand the audience for art in America, to stimulate broad democratic community participation in the creative experience. Cahill claimed that the WPA-FAP had encouraged the closest possible collaboration between the artist and the public for which he works; and because it has held firmly to the idea of the greatest degree of freedom for the artist. Inevitably, matters were less consensual than this implied.15

The relative pluralism of the WPA-FAP came about not only because Cahill and some of his administrators were progressives and liberals, but also because of the solidarity and militancy of the artists.

As a branch of the WPA, the FAP was by definition a relief project; it was means-tested and its primary function was to help those in need. But this should not obscure the fact that Cahill was concerned with the quality of the work and felt that a certain standard was essential to defend the project against congressional criticism. However, he did not enforce narrow quality criteria, as he believed only a liberal conception of standards would generate a widespread flowering of talent. Indeed, the importance of the Federal Art Project lay partly in its educational work, including exhibitions and the founding of Community Art Centers in deprived areas of the country, such as Harlem and Chicagos South Side, which gave important opportunities to young African American artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Charles White.

It is much harder to make a general assessment of WPA art than of the Sections. The Section left a meticulous bureaucratic record in the shape of correspondence from administrators and artists in the National Archives; the WPA-FAP record is principally whatever survives in Holger Cahills papers in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. The majority of Section art remains in the federal buildings for which it was commissioned; the fate of WPA-FAP work loaned to nonfederal state and city institutions was far more precarious, and no central record of it was kept.16 Unlike WPA construction projects, the FAP did not require a sponsor in individual states to pay for nonlabor and part of the labor costs. But project chiefs did not expect the Federal Art Project to give its services gratis. Theoretically, all art produced under WPA-FAP was supposed to be allocable to some public space. These could not be federal buildings but rather authorized governmental agenc[ies], such as schools, hospitals, and courthouses. This proviso and the exclusion of nudes and directly political subject matter were the only restrictions.

Public murals and sculptures were inevitably the aspect of the program that drew most public attention. The work of mural painters and sculptors was more tightly controlled than that of those assigned to the easel and print divisions, and it is by no means clear that radical artists who worked for both the Section and the WPA-FAP produced more politically charged or better work for the latter. What is certain is that in some regions, the Federal Art Project allowed artists a degree of stylistic latitude unthinkable to Bruce, which led to major modernist schemes, the most notable being the Williamsburg Housing Project murals in Brooklyntoday, these murals are partially preserved in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, except for Stuart Daviss standout Swing Landscape (1938), which was never installed and now resides in the collection of the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, at Indiana University Bloomington.17

However, the relative pluralism of the WPA-FAP came about not only because Cahill and some of his administrators were progressives and liberalsnot all werebut also because of the solidarity and militancy of the artists.18 Ironically, if the Federal Art Project approached something like the cultural democracy Cahill aspired to, it was because of artists self-organization through the Artists Union, a structure that was, on one level, a communist front.19 Without intending to, the WPA-FAP and the Communist Party created institutional frameworks within which artists themselves forged a vital collective culture.20

While the coming depression may rival in scale that of the 1930s, the differences in the socioeconomic, political, and cultural circumstances are so vast that they baffle direct comparison. The Green New Deal shares little with its Rooseveltian precursor beyond its name and a willingness to use the machinery of the state to engineer a more just society. New Deal stands more for a motivating myth than a concrete program. Though the precedent of the Unemployed Artists Group might resonate with culture workers subject to an ongoing wave of layoffs and cutbacks in museums, universities, and colleges, in the absence of state employment, the example of the Artists Union may seem rather empty. But its history is otherwise resonant, for it illustrates that unions can be more than simply organized labors authorized bargaining agents. They can also fulfill an educational role and serve as laboratories for an emancipatory cultural vision. While the iconographic, formal, and technical models of much New Deal art seem obsolete today, the artists larger ambition for nonmarket-based artistic economy grounded in truly democratic principles awaits fulfilment.

Andrew Hemingway is Emeritus Professor in History of Art at University College, London.

NOTES

1. Handbill for Artist [sic] Group of the Emergency Work Bureau, September 24, 1933.

2. Andrew Hemingway, Cultural Democracy by Default: The Politics of the New Deal Arts Programmes, Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 2 (2007), 287.

3. Gerald M. Monroe, Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers During the Great Depression, Archives of American Art Journal 14, no.1 (1974): 710; Artists on the Barricades: The Militant Artists Union Treats with the New Deal, Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (1978): 2023.

4. Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 19261956 (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 14951, 198; Louis Lozowick, Status of the Artist in the USSR, in Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 8586, 16265.

5. Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 27. This remains the best general account of the art programs.

6. For a detailed analysis, see Hemingway, Cultural Democracy by Default, 26978.

7. See Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Franciscos Public Murals (Berkeley: California University Press, 1999).

8. See especially Robin D. G. Kelley, Were Getting These Murals All Wrong, The Nation, September 10, 2019.

9. Representative interpretations include Marlene Park and Gerald Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).The most developed comparison of the Treasury and FAP programs is Belisario R. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1983).

10. McKinzie, New Deal, 53.

11. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 16669.

12. See Gerald M. Monroe, Art Front, Archives of American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (1973): 13-19.

13. McKinzie, New Deal, 66. For the ill-fated Treasury Relief Art Project which applied WPA funds to the decoration of existing federal buildings see McKinzie, New Deal, 38-42.

14. McKinzie, New Deal, 105.

15. Holger Cahill, American Resources in the Arts, in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, ed. Francis V. OConnor (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 3344.

16. See Inventory of Section Murals and Sculptures, in Melosh, Engendering Culture, 233-63. The General Services Administration has a cataloging project that has located more than 20,000 WPA artworks. See: http://www.gsa-gov/fine-arts

17. On the modernist murals of the WPA-FAP, see Jody Patterson's important forthcoming book, Modernism for the Masses: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in 1930s New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, November 2020).

18. For artists perception of this, see Stuart Davis, American Artists Congress, in OConnor, Art for the Millions, 250.

19. For a view of the communists role by a participant, see Lincoln Rothschild, Artists Organizations of the Depression Decade, in The New Deal Arts Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, ed. Francis V. OConnor (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 21621.

20. Hemingway, Cultural Democracy by Default, 26987.

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Andrew Hemingway on cultural democracy and the New Deal Art Programs - Artforum

In Seoul, Korea, a metropolis of 10 million, a steady stream of Mercedes sedans pulled up to the valet, disgorging their fashion-forward passengers, in front of the Seoul outpost of a fashionable New York-based gallery, the New York Times reported yesterday. Seoul now has its share of high-end contemporary art galleries and collectors, and after months of lockdown, everyone was ready to see some art.

The art they were seeing was by Billy Childish, a long-time art world rebel and working-class leftist, not to mention garage band rocknroller. His work is now fetching prices cresting beyond $25,000, which he himself considers a matter of luckafter 40 years, the curators and dealers who championed him had finally seized the reins at major institutions, he told the Times.

After experiencing the little tingle that comes when I see the prices politically progressive artists are commanding in the rarefied art marketplace, I marveled at another statistic in the story. Seoul, with more than double the population of Oregon, has recorded only two deaths due to Covid-19.

Two. Deaths.

South Korea jumped immediately into the appropriate pandemic response. The country locked down early, it embraced social distancing, it distributed N-95 quality masks to all of its people, it tested widely, and when people tested positive for Covid-19, it traced and isolated those who came into contact with them. The public took this regime seriously.

Whether or not South Korea can keep its discipline when and if the careful attempts at reopening lead to more outbreaks, is another question. But the successful responses in New Zealand and Hong Kong, in addition to South Korea, show that humans can organize themselves well enough to minimize the damage.

Just not American humans. In our cities, for the most part, Americans sheltered in place and distanced themselves from each other. And outside of New York, we managed to dodge the worst of Covid-19. But after that, nothing went right. No masks, no testing, no tracing, no isolation of those exposed. America once had a public health system (as opposed to private healthcare) and an emergency response system that were arguably the worlds best. That was a while ago, back before the decline of democracy here really took hold. More than half of us, even now, would vote for restoring our public health and emergency response systems to their previous heights. But that never seems to come up for a vote, and thats one good measure of how broken our democracythe distance between the wishes of the people and the governments public policy.

I have some reservations about my sense of the whole. When the slogans of one political party include Were all going to die sometime and Granny is willing to sacrifice herself so that the transfer of wealth to the tiny top of the pyramid can continue unabated, it does give me pause. But, America, I see you staying at home and social distancing. Youre not entirely crazy. You understand the simple argument that we protect ourselves by protecting each other. (Please, wear a mask!)

So, if you think that American democracy and American society have hit a dead end, youre not alone. Covid-19 presents us with a daily reminder of our inability to deal with a general health crisis. And as so many other observers have noted, it exposes crises of other sorts, too, much deeper ones that will keep us from ever responding appropriately to emergencies. Climate change will drop many plagues upon us. A pandemic with a death rate that seems to hover around two percent may be a picnic compared to what could be coming our way. The more democratic we are, the better the chance well have to deal with them.

*****

American democracy was not the subject of my conversation with George Thorn, arts consultant/advisor extraordinaire, late last week. We were talking about Portland arts organizations, though more general matters also came up, including our local government.

Since the pandemic lockdown in Portland, Thorn reckons that hes talked to staffers from at least 40 arts organizations. The bottom line: Everybody is being hurt by this, and some really, really badly.

Each group has different problems, but they are all calculating how many staffers they can keep on, a difficult calculation when no one knows how much federal support they will get (or whether they will get any at all), and how to keep enough money set aside to start up again when the stay-at-home restrictions are loosened. And what the world will be like when they do: Each organization needs to envision what this new reality will be, Thorn advised.

How much can they count on the City of Portland? I dont think the City cares about what happens to arts and culture organizations, Thorn said. That assertion led me to consider whether or not society and democracy in Portland had also hit a dead end. I think most of us DO care what happens to arts and culture organizations in the city. Thats because, unlike our leaders, we understand the many roles the arts play in a city and in our personal lives.

The arts have never been needed more than they are today, Thorn said. The arts are how we come together. They ask, how do you want to shape the new reality?

What everyone is trying to figure out, thats what artists do every day, he continued. Artists move from idea to vision to process to procuring resources. The idea evolves, the problems are solved, theres never enough time, people or money. And yet, something arrives on the stage, concert hall, gallery wall, page, or some other platform. Often enough, something amazing. When we re-embrace the practicality of artists, their creativity and problem-solving, then well be able to mask, test, trace and isolate. This isnt something we dont know how to do.

We cant wait to be in a room together with artists; we all want to be back in a room together, Thorn said.

And what are the artists saying, I asked him. Stay with us. Were going to need some help.

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Starting Over: Masks and democracy - Oregon ArtsWatch